The Blowhole

Words by Lexi Love-Dack

Photographs by Tim O’Keefe

Content warning

This story discusses death, miscarriage, domestic violence, suicide and mental illness. If you're in crisis, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or find more contact information on our Resources page.

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The Blowhole is located on a stretch of rocky coastline between Flinders and Cape Schanck on the Mornington Peninsula, not far from where I grew up.

When it’s high tide, the waves crash through an opening in the rock wall and shoot up through a hole in the cave roof, creating the effect of water spouting out of a whale’s blowhole. We walked our dogs there on weekends. This is the place where my mother threatened to jump, more times than I can count. 

When I think about all the pain and damage she’s inflicted upon me, I kind of wish that she’d done it. Then the thoughts of guilt and shame flood in, and I recognise how conditioned I am by a childhood filled with violence and manipulation. 

In an airport bathroom nine weeks ago, snapping out of a daze, I found myself standing upright, my forehead resting against the cool wall tiles; my arms hanging limply down into one of those Dyson hand dryers. The air had gotten extremely hot and was singeing my wrists. I wondered if this act could be comparable to some sort of suicidal activity. How long would I have to stand here until it started burning away at the soft flesh on my wrists? I stayed there a while longer, testing it. 

I’ve never been a self-harm kind of person. In fact, I was strangely envious of the girls who cut at my high school. Their pain was palpable yet showy. At least they had an outlet. I kept my shit internal, except for when my bruises were visible. I dwell a lot on my high school years; I wonder how different my life could have been if I’d had more psychological support. 

My doctor tells me to read up about my mother’s borderline personality disorder, and encourages me to educate myself on theories on childhood trauma, and how it can affect brain development. It can quite literally stunt the way our brain forms. Perhaps this is why I still feel trapped in my teenage mindset, why I find it so hard to break out of my destructive behaviours and thought processes. 

Returning from school holidays and into year eight after my dad drowned, I found that my friends didn’t know how to talk to me—they could barely make eye contact with me. The depth of my loss was too much for them to comprehend. I was already a fish out of water at that school. I was on a scholarship and from a lefty family who lived in the sticks. I wasn’t accustomed to the high stakes free dress days nor did I expect a brand-new Mercedes for my eighteenth birthday. 

I began to form two strong female friendships, one with a girl who wrote me a letter over the holidays, saying that her uncle had died of cancer and she was there for me, and another with a girl in the year above me, at an extra-curricular musical theatre club. Inter-year friendships were almost unheard of at our bitchy all girls college, yet we clicked the minute we met, and found that we’d both grown up amongst discord and abuse. 

2002: My best friend’s mum dabs arnica ointment onto my cheekbone where the Nokia 3210 struck me. 

She takes photos on her digital camera as evidence; she says we can go to the police. I’m so scared. I’ve called them to my house that many times and Mum makes out like I’m just some bratty teen throwing a tantrum. They make me feel accountable. 

What do you want to happen? Do you want to go into state care? Do you want to be split apart from your siblings? 

I call family friends and my uncle in New Zealand to try and tell them what’s really going on. 

Your mum’s been through a lot, you know. 

I know. 

My sister Belle and I often talk about Boxing Day. We rode our bikes to the holiday house, a feat we’d never attempted before. Our Mum had left us behind because we were taking too long to get up. Dirt roads with steep inclines and gullies, from our home in the hinterland to the house our grandpa built on the coast in the fifties. Every Christmas was spent there. As we struggled up the second hill, Mum’s old Peugeot came hurtling towards us. 

Get in, leave the bikes. 

The man on the radio says there’s been an accident in the Big Bay Race.
Belle and I recount the series of events. She says,

Do you remember it was Jenny who told us he’d actually died?

(We’ve called our grandma Jenny forever; she says being called Grandma makes her feel old.) 

Yeah, she came in with Aunty Julia and you said there’d been a fatality on the news. 

She said, ‘It was Lindsey’. 

No, she yelled, like, ‘IT WAS YOUR FATHER’ like we were stupid for not knowing already. She told us before Mum even knew. 

You ran outside and vomited on the grass. 

Yeah, I remember...I was like, ten.

I’ve always thought of myself as a bit of a late bloomer, only going to study in my late twenties, only really discovering the things that fulfil me later down the track, while all of my straight friends are on ‘babymoons’ and investing in property. 

I wonder if I’m this way because of my impeded development. Because of my father drowning in a yachting accident. Because of my mother who drank, lied, physically attacked us, and threatened to jump on a weekly basis. No wonder it’s a go-to thought, it’s conditioned. 

It’s left a deeper mark on my younger sister and brother. Both have suffered more at the hands of mental illness than I, with various dependencies and multiple suicide attempts each. I believe it’s because I got to spend more time with Dad, the more level-headed practical parent, that I came out of it all a little less worse off. I’ve always been the one to come to the rescue. Even as a thirteen-year-old I stepped into the parental role, made their school lunches, intervened when my mother’s tirades took aim at them. 

When I was fourteen, we scattered my father’s ashes at one of his favourite places, the ‘Blue Grotto’ on Erith Island in Bass Strait, about halfway between Victoria and Tasmania. My mother wouldn’t wait for my little brother, then aged seven, to stop having a tantrum on the beach so she left him behind. I remember feeling so helpless as she steered the tinnie around the cove, seeing his small silhouette standing forlorn on the shore. There was no time limit, no deadline to get this deed done, and she took his chance to say goodbye away forever, for no good reason. 

Mum’s side of the family has been going to this wild archipelago since their friends bought the lease in the 1950s from a cattle drover. It has one dwelling called ‘The Hut’, wooden structures serving as campsite kitchens and a few sheds and water tanks are hidden amongst the dense tea tree scrub for those in the know. When my mother and father began dating, my father had been a welcome addition to the little clan of ‘Erithrians’ who spent summers at this place, mainly made up of artists and poets, ex-communists and war veterans from my grandparents’ generation. My grandfather died on the beach there in 1974. It feels like a curse. The men in my family don’t survive. 

My sister’s baby boy, Finn, died last May. His paternal grandmother put him to bed with a travel neck pillow strapped around his neck. He choked to death while she napped and checked Facebook. She has since hung herself. 

I found myself snapping into mother mode. I flew to Perth, met with coroners and morticians, organised a cremation, a funeral, and spoke with detectives daily. I feel like I spent as much time with Finn as his own father did. His ashes sit on my desk and I dream of him every night. I cannot accept that he is gone. 

Last night I dreamt he was in his car seat. I leant over to tickle his feet again, as I so often did. But this time he was dead; somehow, I must have braked too hard and snapped his neck from the whiplash. I looked back again, but now he had the angry red stitches around the base of his throat and up behind his right ear from the second autopsy. I should have kept the beanie on. I stop the car and pull him out of his seatbelt. I cradle him and hold his head the way the mortician told me to. My friend Keats is in the passenger seat now, he tells me he’ll keep my secret. I rock Finn back and forth the way I did to get him to sleep so often. My sister said not to sway him; that he’d get too dependent on it. Use the ocean noise machine instead, she insisted. 

I struggle to let go of people and relationships, I loop around and around about what could have been done differently. I have an inability to accept death and loss. Is this because my mother was in denial about my father’s death for so long? Did I learn to bury my head in the sand from her? 

For a long time, I pretended I was fine. I did ‘normal’ things and worked shitty retail jobs. I had a boyfriend, a dog and a house. I pretended I was okay about not getting into university, though I knew I’d blown my VCE thanks to my poor attendance record and unacknowledged depression. 

I floated through my twenties, always coasting along the surface, never wanting to dive deeper into the abyss of darkness that I knew would bubble up sooner or later. But at some point, I grew weary of it. I became hedonistic, though I wasn’t as confident in my abilities or myself anymore; I was confident in wanting to explore new worlds. Drugs happened, self-destruction happened. Actually, they didn’t happen; I sought them out.

Nothing crazy, I told myself, I’d never do anything too hard, but I liked feeling out of control. Sometimes I liked to feel really wild. I wanted to feel different in my body, that phosphorescence flowing through my limbs. 

I love to swim, especially in the ocean. My year ten physics teacher explained to me the different properties of liquids, solids and gases. That all water is connected in one vast cycle. When I swim in the sea, I believe the particles touching my skin, are the same ones that surrounded my dad as he took his last breaths. His ashes were returned to the sea too, I remember feeling queasy when they bubbled at the impact, taking forever to drift apart or filter down below the surface. I wonder what form those ash particles have taken now. Do they wash around the ocean floor stateless? Have they been absorbed or consumed by marine life? Have I consumed them again in some form? 

A religious teacher at my primary school asked us to pray for a friend’s puppy that died. I had recurring nightmares about dying for a long time after that. What would happen to my brain after I died? I couldn’t bear the thought of the lights, currents and synapses of a brain just going dull, sitting inside a human skull, starting to decay. 

My parents, being mild atheists, took me out of religion class after this. My dad told me he didn’t believe in a god, but that the world was god; the cycles, the beauty in life and death.
He said we’d all go back to the earth eventually; we’d feed the worms that would go on to nourish the soil that would grow food and feed future people. Somehow this comforted me as a six-year-old, sobbing into her pillow. 

Why couldn’t she have died instead? 

I’m sixteen. She sits on my chest, crushing the air out of me. She’s menacingly strong for a woman of her stature. She pins my arms to the cold floorboards of my bedroom and spits in my face. My father had sanded those floorboards by hand the summer before he died. We lived at the holiday house for a week while the varnish dried. She screams incomprehensible vitriol at me; her breath is foul smelling, white wine and venom. I gag at the smell and she laughs. My protector. 

I move out. 

I know I’m resilient. Everyone tells me so. None of this matters, people have it much worse. At least I haven’t been sexually abused like my friend Bee.
I can’t let it matter. But I am matter, particles in different states of movement, bound together into a human form. 

I’ve always held the belief that I’m damaged. I’ve experienced far too many surgeries and sickness for someone my age. I believe that trauma has affected my body on a cellular level. 

Apparently I have an autoimmune disease. And a year of steroids and chemotherapy did jack-all, apart from making me gain fifteen kilos.

I decide to change my lifestyle. I cut out alcohol, meat, gluten and all dairy - with the exception of cheese. For some reason, I can’t give up cheese, and anyway, the FODMAP diet guide says hard cheese is fine because the aging process reduces its lactose levels. 

I take myself off everything including the pill; I don’t want any more chemicals in my body. I exercise like crazy and lose weight. My mental health improves significantly. I start to write again, form a band and experience a tiny taste of success. I’m finding myself and finding myself strangely grateful for the sickness that sparked some sort of authenticity in me. 

My partner and I begin to grow apart. My only safety net is dissolving. We go to Japan to celebrate our twelve-year anniversary and I realise a few weeks in that I’m very late. And all I’ve done is eat raw fish and drink beer. 

I’m not ready to be a dad. 

And with those words absorbed, my body knows it needs to let go. I want to fly home from Osaka. I’ve wanted to leave him for almost a year. But I’m turning thirty, and maybe no one is ever really ready to be a parent...? I also want to see the Wisteria blossom tunnels of Kawachi Fujien, that’s why we’ve driven so far south. 

I send him out for the day and miscarry alone in an Airbnb in Fukuoka. I sit in the tiny bath, never intended for a woman of my proportions, and let the clumps come out of me. I rub some of the viscous blood between my fingertips. So much potential in these cells. 

I would never do to you what she did to me. 

I’m down the coast, not far from the Blowhole, the day after Finn’s funeral. It’s midwinter but I take all my clothes off and swim in the rock pools. The waves crash over the reef and the glacial water snaps me out of the daze I’ve been in for three weeks. For nineteen years. Forever. 

My life has been tides, sickness and death rising up to crash me down, over and over, sucking parts of my soul away. But I don’t want to stay frozen in my memories or regrets any longer. 

From now on I’ll be formless, I’ll ride the swell and follow the currents.
I’ll filter out the silt and only let what feels right settle. I’ll give life, nurture and feel no shame. 

I will be like water. ✿

Image Description: photograph of two people floating in an aqua blue swimming hole surrounded by rocks.